


ten thousand miles

by scionblad



Series: the village atop the hill [5]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Brotherly Bonding, Character Study, Family, Father-Son Relationship, Fish Printing, Fishing, Fist Fights, Gen, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Post-Recall, Young Genji Shimada, Young Hanzo Shimada
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-18
Updated: 2018-04-18
Packaged: 2019-04-23 11:16:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,715
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14331291
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scionblad/pseuds/scionblad
Summary: Wherever Hanzo goes, he cannot help but see the sea and the fish in it, and remember those days spent fishing with his father.





	ten thousand miles

Every summer, the Shimadas went to Okinawa, quietly vacationing by the sea for a month, before returning to Hanamura’s brisk mountain breeze for the last and hottest month of the season. 

And in Okinawa, their father took them fishing.

The quiet early hours of morning sleep were broken, always, by their father’s soft whisper, “get up, get up.” Genji wheedled and whined, thrashed about in bed before tumbling out with a complaint, but Hanzo did so without a word. He had always liked the morning, the strange mystic fogginess that happened early in the day, even when the sky was clear.

They walked up the side of the hill, towards the pier that stretched out into the ocean, Genji leading, Hanzo behind with the box of bait, and their father last, three rods over his shoulder. The sea hissed and sighed beneath their feet. Genji ran out onto the pier, laughing, greeting the wind with open arms, and Hanzo struggled to keep up, both hands carrying the clunky box. 

“Genji,” their father called. “Wait for your older brother and your old, aging father!”

Genji shrieked in laughter, echoing in the emptiness of the shore at morning. At the end of the dock Hanzo set the box down, and their father flicked open the clasps with easy familiarity. Genji hooted at the sight of wriggling worms and bugs, and reached his grubby hands out to grab one.

“Wait, little sparrow,” said their father. He pinched a worm out of the box. Hanzo wrinkled his nose as it curled itself around thin air, its head—or tail?—moving this way and that.

“Like this,” their father said, and his worn, calloused hands pulled the worm onto the hook easily. Hanzo and Genji watched, their smaller hands itching for a fishing rod, too—

“Patience,” said their father, still baiting hooks. “There. Do you remember how to throw the line?”

“Yes, Father,” they chorused.

And with a  _ plop, plop _ , their hooks splashed into the water. The sea lapped steadily at the legs of the dock. Genji fidgeted.

“Patience, little sparrow,” said their father.

“I  _ know _ .”

Hanzo’s line tugged. The rod slipped in his hands, but he gripped it as tightly as he could.

“Father!” he yelled, and his father came running and wrapped his great big strong hands around Hanzo’s, and together they hauled the fish out of the water.

“Well done!” their father exclaimed. “A beautiful catch.”

The fish wriggled and flopped all over, but its scales shone in the early gray light of the morning. It was roughly the size of their father’s foot. 

They took it home when the sun reached high in the sky, Hanzo carrying it himself over the dunes and through the street all the way to their kitchen.

“Oh my,” said their mother. “You carried it all the way home yourself? What a strong child.”

“My strong, strong son,” said their father proudly. And Hanzo glowed.

 

 

 

 

  
  
Hanzo awoke, several hours later, from a daytime nap. Genji was still sleeping next to him, his arms and legs sprawled all over the futon, drooling a little bit on the pillow.

The smell woke him. He had always had a keen nose. It was faint, but present, briny, and accompanied by the noise of rushing water. He wandered towards it, and stopped at the entrance to the kitchen. 

The door where it opened out into the yard hung ajar. His father stood over the fish at the table, cleaning it, the golden light of early evening catching on his skin in brilliant patches of white. The tattoos of the blue dragon peeked out from under his rolled-up sleeves. Hanzo watched, one hand wrapped around the doorway, transfixed. 

“Hanzo, my son,” his father said, without turning around. “Come here. Let me show you something.”

He crept forward silently, almost ashamed, but when his father turned to look at him, there was nothing but warmth in his expression. “You are not in trouble,” he laughed, and pulled up a stool so Hanzo could see the table properly.

The fish that they had caught earlier that day sat on ice in a plastic bin, to keep its flesh taut, but as Hanzo watched, his father took the fish, patted it dry with a towel, and then took out a jar of black ink and a sheet of thin white paper. He spoke as he worked, his hands moving quickly, practiced, like he had done this many times before.

“A long, long time ago,” he said, “the samurai of this country were all expected to be very great accomplished men. They had to practice swordsmanship, painting, poetry, wrestling—and among those accomplishments, they also had to be good at fishing.

“Once, a lord demanded that all his samurai catch the biggest fish they could—but his castle was very far from the coast, and fish brought to his castle from the sea rotted before the samurai could present them to him. So they took the ink and paper used for poetry and painted the side of the fish with ink”—and Hanzo watched as his father gently brushed the fish’s side with black—“and then pressed a paper against it.”

His father’s hand rubbed the paper against the bulge of fish deftly, once, twice.

“Watch here,” he said, and took one corner of the paper and peeled it off, slowly. Hanzo stared, transfixed. The fish on the paper seemed to dance off the page, speckled lines for scales and fins.

“Do you want to try?” his father asked, and Hanzo nodded fervently.

Under his father’s watchful eye, he brushed the side of the fish with black in clumsy strokes, laid the paper over it, pressed his hands across the body of the fish, once, twice, like he had seen his father do. The print, when they lifted the paper, was smudged and far from perfect, but face of the fish, noble as it was, shined clearly in the black ink.

He marveled. It had come from his own hands, this fish he had hauled out of the sea, caressed through paper and ink, this thing that was uniquely his own.

“No matter what,” his father said to him, “we all live in this world together. We must have respect for all the living things around us. Remember,” he said, tapping the paper with the fish printed on it, “the beauty of this fish that we caught. Be thankful for the sustenance it gives us. Every living thing is worth something.”

“Yes, Father,” said Hanzo, clutching his own print.

The fish lay on the table, coated slick shining black on its side, unmoving. They would clean it, eventually, and grill it, charring its skin brown and black, painting it not with ink but sweet and savory sauce. He could taste the ocean in every bit of its flesh. It sank to the bottom of his belly, and warmed him from inside-out. 

That night Hanzo dreamt of the fish, splashing and thrashing on the hook, as the line carried it upstream towards the high brisk mountain streams, by the village atop the hill, with cherry blossoms in the spring.

 

 

 

 

  
  
He had been very young, then. The dream of fishing with his father again, though rooted in memory, floated away like mist.

“Hey, brother,” said Genji in a drunken drawl. “Let’s goooo.”

He had fallen asleep. Embarrassing. He checked his reflection in the dark glass of his phone briefly, half-expecting Genji to have written something crude on his face in black marker. Thankfully, his face was clean. In retrospect, he really shouldn’t have gone drinking with Genji in the first place, but someone had to look out for his baby brother. The last time Genji had drank by himself, he had turned up with red palm-prints all over his face from scorned women, and Hanzo had received three red angry strikes on his face himself,  _ your brother is twenty, now, he should know better! _

“Where are we going?” he asked.

“Dunno,” said Genji, stretching. “But I’m bored of this bar. No cute girls here. No cute boys either.”

Hanzo said nothing. Genji threw a few bills on the counter and then waved casually at the bartenders. “Bye now!” he said, sauntering out of the bar, and Hanzo scrambled to follow.

“Genji,” he said, once they were outside. “We should go home. It’s late.”

“It’s not that late,” Genji retorted. “We have the whole night to ourselves!”

He flung out his arms, laughing—hitting a man in a suit straight in the face.

“Hey!” said the man in a suit, and Hanzo realized with sudden cold horror that the man was local yakuza—they were the ones intruding. “Watch where you’re going!”

“Watch where  _ you’re _ going!” said Genji.

“Genji,” said Hanzo desperately, but the man was already swinging fists, and his friends were swinging, too, and Hanzo had no choice but to leap in and protect his baby brother. Neither of them were strangers to a brawl, and they could both hold their own in a fight, but they were sorely outnumbered, seven men to their twosome.

Somewhere behind them, a woman screamed, her voice pitching wildly, and a faint yell of “Police!”

“Police!” echoed the man’s friends, and they scrambled to leave.

“Don’t you dare!” yelled Genji.

“Genji, no!” yelled Hanzo. He swung another punch, knocked another man out. “Genji, it’s not worth it!”

The police grabbed Genji by both arms, and he struggled, kicking and screaming. “Brother!” he yelled.

“Genji!” yelled Hanzo again, but they grabbed him too, forced him down on the tough asphalt of the street.

“Let go of me!” said Genji, struggling.

“Shut up!” said the policeman.

“No,” pleaded Genji. “We’re Shimada, Shimada!”

Hanzo screwed his eyes shut, cringing at his brother’s impertinence.

“Shimada, huh,” snarled the police officer. “Well, I know just where to put you two.”

His stomach sank hearing that. The car ride to holding felt longer than it needed to be, and Hanzo could not help but turn his thoughts around and around in circles of despair, as the lights of the road passed over their faces in even intervals. Who would pay their bail? Who would tell their father? Who would be punished at home? Fingers might be cut off, or he might receive a striking, or fire arrows at Shimada Castle’s range until his fingers bled. That, he could bear—but Genji, his younger brother, oh, Genji. The car shook slightly with the force of its speed, and Genji’s head rolled back and forth atop Hanzo’s shoulder.

“Brother,” mumbled Genji, still in a haze of alcohol, and Hanzo sighed and rested his head on Genji’s green hair.

How could he leave Genji to deal with it all? He couldn’t.

“We’re here,” said the officer in a low, gravelly voice. Hanzo jerked awake. He had not meant to fall asleep.

“Genji,” he whispered. Genji grunted, shifted in his sleep, didn’t wake up.

“You two are hella cute,” said the officer. Hanzo glared at him.

They were thrown crudely onto the floor of the cell. Hanzo closed his eyes and did his best to ignore the throbbing of his cheek, cold against the concrete. How would he explain this to Father? How would he explain Genji, again, to the disapproving eyes he knew too well?

“Oh?” said a familiar voice. “I did not expect you two to be here, of all people.”

Hanzo’s eyes snapped open. The panic rushing through his head burned the drunken stupor away.

“Father!” he cried, scrambling to sit properly, legs folded under him. Beside him, Genji raised his head.

“Father?” echoed his younger brother, the haze of alcohol still shining over his eyes—but he made effort to sober up and appear respectable. Their father’s gaze softened.

“My sparrow,” he said.

Hanzo waited, hands clenched, as their father looked at him.

“Hanzo,” he said.

The son had gotten the acknowledgement he’d wished for, but he had nothing. His father sat in the jail cell, legs crossed like a lord welcoming his lieutenants, and Hanzo was empty-handed. He had not made prints in months, he realized with desperation. He had not been near the sea, he had not felt the wind rush from the south in recognition of its master, his tattoos were only lines crawling over his arm, yet to be dragon’s flesh and storm in truth.

And yet how long had it been since his father had taken him fishing? Often more than not he was in jail, prison, in his stone cell, unfeeling of the wind outside.

It wasn’t his fault, but it was. He was, all things considered, still effectively a samurai reporting to the lord, and he had nothing to show for it.

“What did you do to land yourselves in jail?” said their father, flicking the ash off his cigarette.

“Er,” said Hanzo. He looked at Genji, who shrugged. “We got in a fight,” he said lamely.

“An honorable reason.”

“But what about you?” said Genji childishly.

“Ah,” said their father, rearranging his clothes, taking a deep breath from his cigarette. “It’s safer in here.”

“Safer?” echoed Genji.

Their father grunted in agreement. “There are many toys people have that can kill me—knives, guns… But not in here”—he nodded towards the guards—“none of those things are allowed in here. I sleep like a child, it’s that safe.”

Hanzo thought wildly of Shimada Castle, with its tall gates, stone walls, sprawled on top of that hill. Would that not be safe too? Their mother’s warm hands, the soup from the kitchen, the comforting drafts through the open windows, the cherry blossoms in the spring. Would it not be safer?

It was not Hanzo’s place to say. He was merely a tool to the lord, a child obeying his father.

“Come,” their father said. He motioned to the police. “Get me a few cigarettes, will you? And some sake. We have guests!”

Guests, in a place his own blood called home so easily. But it was cold and dark, and though the sake was good, it tasted like all show and pretension, fit for strangers who might not have known better.

But he knew better.

Had it been all fake? That day he had thought of earlier, his father saying his name in warm tones that reached all the way to his toes, the sweet glow of pride in eyes they had inherited, the magical paper peeling off the fish to create an image, black and white, speckled with salt stains and the texture of scales. After all, he wasn’t the beloved sparrow.

The fish in his memory wriggled and splashed, like the proverbial koi fish splashing upstream, dreaming of the dragon gate, swimming towards freedom.

His hands tingled like they were smoothing paper over fish, feeling every scale and fin under the fibers. Vainly, he wished for that day again, but he had lost sight of the mystic morning sunlight, submersed as he was in the dark world of his father’s empire.

The sake flowed. Hanzo leaned against the wall of the cell and dreamed.

 

 

 

 

  
  
Genji stopped coming with them to fish when he was fifteen and Hanzo was eighteen.

Their yearly trips to Okinawa had taken a strange turn in tone after their mother’s death. Genji seemed distant. Often he was found at arcades or hanging with local punks on the street or in a bar in the town, drinking until the sun came up, and indulging more than he ought.

His father, too, seemed to be in prison more often than not. He could wear his shirt open there, roll up his sleeves a little higher, there, but Hanzo didn’t know what he did there or why he hid from them. Maybe he was ashamed of their youthful brashness. Maybe he was just busy, managing his family—not his wife and Hanzo and Genji, but the men who obeyed his every command without hesitation.

But Hanzo made prints. He made them, at first, to show his father the fine texture of the scales or the noble shape of the fins or the sheer size of some of the fish he caught, but as summer passed, the stack of papers grew taller every night and his father had still yet to come lay eyes on any one of them.

Even still, he kept printing. It was something he could not help doing now. Every morning—fish, print, fish, print. It was nothing about the aesthetics or the art—he wouldn’t say that he was any sort of artist at all, he really wasn’t—but the simplicity of it all, the ink, the fish, the paper, his hands. And with every print he made he learned, wordlessly, the firmness of the fish’s flesh, the soft liquid of the sumi ink, the feel and flex of the paper, the stroke he took to rub the ink onto paper, print, fish, print, fish. And he experimented: two fish on one paper, fish overlapping, fish dancing and jumping, more ink, less ink, direct print, indirect print. The prints became tokens not only of his fishing skill, but his knowledge of the materials, dancing fish alive yet not alive.

And when he had finished printing, he ate them all, grilled them all himself, brushed savory-sweet sauce over the skin and shoved it in his mouth on a bed of rice and watered it down with rice wine, clear and fragrant. More often than not, he uttered “let us eat” to an empty table, but he grew used to its lonely silence. After all, what was there to be said?

Genji came and left, and their father remained a ghost. The last summer before their father died was the quietest yet, and soon after the funeral they stopped summering in Okinawa altogether. It was not the same place anymore, deprived of its bright childhood haze.

He had not been back in years.

As it were, there were many Japanese speakers in Hawaii. It was a perk, for sure, though Hanzo had only come out of a fit of wanderlust and boredom. The island’s heat and humidity had brought small strands of regret itching up his conscience, but he had no money to travel elsewhere for a while yet. It at least reminded him a little of Okinawa, but in a good way, when the island was still fresh in his eyes.

He left Stormbow at the hotel, in a secure locked place so housekeeping wouldn’t stumble across it easily, and wandered. The beach was pleasant, the water shining bright blue-green like crystal, and people chattered as they walked by him, paying no mind to him.

He had no one to buy souvenirs for, but he stopped by a store anyway. He was a tourist, for the time being. He could afford to look, play the part.

It was a quaint store, the shelves lined with small statues and postcards and commemorative cups, cozy beach scenes and marine motifs scattered about. But he stopped, his eye catching something familiar—on the wall, framed in smart black wood, a fish print. He stared.

“Those are fish prints, done by local artists,” said the storekeeper, who had appeared out of nowhere. “It’s a traditional Japanese art, called—”

“Gyotaku,” said Hanzo, not taking his eyes off the print. “It’s called gyotaku.”

She looked slightly taken aback. “Well, yes,” she said. “Do you also practice?”

“Once,” said Hanzo. “Not much anymore.”

“I see.”

She looked like she didn’t quite know what to make of the situation. He didn’t either. Before, when he fished, it had been something he made to show others, but no one had seen them in years, and it had resulted in a useless endeavor.

And still, they made. He had grown out of that habit.

“Why do they make these?” he asked, the words stuttering out of his mouth, feeling incredibly stupid.

“Often times they run workshops to teach people about the art, but also to help people to learn more about the fish themselves, and the ecosystem,” said the storekeeper, seeming relieved with a more comfortable topic. “Though sometimes it’s really just about appreciating nature, and the gifts we’re given in this world.”

It was very clear, then, in his head, his father tapping the page of printed fish, another hand on his shoulder,  _ every living thing is worth something. _

“Oh,” he said. “I see.”

She nodded and moved away with a “let me know if you need anything,” but he stared and felt a strange twinge somewhere behind his ribcage—a numbness? A heaviness? He couldn’t be sure.

The thought came into his mind, unbidden.  _ Genji. _

“Did you make all these?” he had asked on a rare day he was at their summer home. Hanzo had looked at him and seen how his eyes were blown out, how his hand stumbled and quivered with an excess of energy that had built up, artificially, in his body.

“Yes,” he said, unable to lie.

“These are  _ dope,” _ said Genji. He scrabbled a hand through them.  _ “Dope.” _

He had not said anything, then, just watched as Genji scattered the papers, laid down in the pile, sniffing.

“They smell fishy,” he said, lost in his high. “Ow, my nose.”

He did not know what had caused him to remember that, suddenly—it felt like something he had made up, to protect his own sanity from the unbearable stretches of nothing. And yet. Hanzo looked at the fish print. And yet.

 

 

 

 

 

The winds at Gibraltar made for odd fishing conditions, but he managed, somehow.

He had acquired a new rod recently, made in England, and brand-new fishing line that was as strong as they came. The mornings on the island were not as misty as he remembered Okinawa to be, but that was fine. The faint pink of the sky was more than enough to comfort him.

In the most recent months, his time at Overwatch had been occupied with training, adjusting to the team-based missions after working so long by himself, but his dream the night before had been strange—fishing again, in misty Okinawa, and Genji’s laughter, shrieking and piercing through the fog. The more he thought about it, the more the details rushed away, like water seeping through two cupped hands. Soon enough there would be no memory of it, just a faint, hollow feeling, and an itch to feel the sea breeze and pull a fish out of the water.

It was early, anyhow. Most of the agents were sleeping still, and Athena let him slip out once he confirmed he was only going to fish. Now the tides were picking up. He pulled the bait onto the hook with practiced hands, just as his father had done years ago, and  _ plop,  _ waited for the bite.

The fish he caught was by no means a big fish, but it was a handsome one. He killed it with a swift blow and cleaned it of the sea slime, patted it dry with an old towel, and then unscrewed his jar of sumi ink, and swirled the brush around in it, painted its side black, arranged its body on the bottom buffer paper he had prepared. Dancing, dancing fish. Then, with practiced hands, he pressed the rice paper to it, and rubbed in swift, familiar strokes, once, twice. He hadn’t done it in a long time, but it had transferred well, the ink. The distinct shape of fin and tail and head were all clearly marked.

He had brought a sizeable stack of paper, but soon it was all gone, from printing again, again. Realizing he had no more paper left was like the first breath after a long dive in the sea. The sun was now almost overhead.

The base was louder, now, when he finally returned with his prints, his ink, and a fish to cook, thinking perhaps Mei could steam it, if she knew how. People were bustling around; he nodded briskly to Hana and Lúcio on his way to the kitchen, and to Ziegler, who raised one arch eyebrow at the stack of papers and ink brush in his hand.

He kept walking. There was only really one person he could show it to, naturally. Hanzo could not spell out why, or how, exactly, he felt this to be the truth. Maybe the others might not understand. Maybe the others did not have a father who shrank into the shadows as they grew up, a father who held their hand in the golden early morning of childhood, a father who fished for them and printed the fish with ink and palm, like a proper samurai of this country.

Genji’s door was closed, but there were soft voices coming from within. Hanzo hesitated, papers shaking in his hands, before swallowing down his useless nervousness and rapped smartly on the door.

“Come in,” said Genji.

Hanzo entered. Genji was seated on the floor, his legs crossed, face unmasked, while Zenyatta floated in front of him. Genji stood up, realizing who had entered.

“Hanzo?” he said. Then, in Japanese: “Brother.”

“Sorry,” Hanzo said to Zenyatta.

“No,” said Zenyatta. “Do not let me interrupt.” 

With that, he left the room. Genji watched him leave, and then looked back at Hanzo.

“What’s up?”

“Um,” said Hanzo. “I just—I have these.”

And he knelt on the floor and  laid out the paper, with the fish printed on them in various shades of black. Genji watched wordlessly.

“Ah,” he said after a while. “I remember this.”

“What?”

“Father made them, sometimes,” said Genji. “Didn’t he?”

“Y-yeah,” said Hanzo. Genji hummed a little bit, brushed his fingers over the paper.

“These are beautiful.”

“I… Thank you,” said Hanzo awkwardly.

He watched as Genji sifted through the pages, his hands gently taking each paper with a certain awe—until they paused.

“I like this one,” he said. And Hanzo glanced at it, and looked away immediately.

“Oh,” he said gruffly. “That one.”

Two fish, circling each other, like their family insignia. Dragon of the north wind, dragon of the south wind.

“Doesn’t it look like us?” said Genji, a spark of humor in his voice. “Like the dragons.”

“Well,” said Hanzo uncomfortably. “Yeah. It just. It happened.”

“Sometimes we cannot escape our fates.” Genji put the papers back together and held them out to Hanzo with two hands. “It can’t be helped.”

“I suppose so,” said Hanzo, hesitantly.

He took his prints back, unsure what to do with them.

“Brother,” said Genji, suddenly.

“Yes?”

“Thank you.”

“What for?”

“For showing me.” Genji smiled, almost to himself. “The last time I saw these was so long ago. That summer before father died.”

“You remember that?”

“Of course,” said Genji promptly. “I hadn’t seen anything like that from you ever. My big brother? Doing art?”

“It’s not really art,” said Hanzo.

“It kind of is,” countered Genji. “No, not kind of, it  _ is.  _ It was cool. Like I saw a part of you that wasn’t someone telling you to do it. You were just doing it. It was just you.”

Hanzo frowned.

“You don’t agree with me?”

“No, I just—” Hanzo opened his mouth, closed it. “I’m just not even sure if it is true.”

Genji shrugged. “Well, it does not matter. It’s just how I see things.”

“Huh.”

“You should keep doing it,” said Genji. “And… you know. Take me next time.”

“What?”

Genji sighed. “You are getting old enough that you can’t hear things anymore.”

“That is not what that was,” said Hanzo indignantly.

“So used to doing things alone that you can’t comprehend the idea of doing things with other people, then?”

Hanzo glared at him. “Shut up.”

“I mean it, though,” said Genji. “Take me next time. And… show me how to do it.”

Hanzo looked at the prints in his hands. 

“Brother.”

“Okay,” Hanzo said finally. “Tomorrow morning.”

Genji beamed.

“You have to wake up early.”

“Wait, really? Hold on, I change my mi—”

“Nope, you already agreed.”

And while Genji protested, Hanzo quirked a smirk, then a grin, then a chuckle, then a laugh, and then they were both laughing, like it was summer in Okinawa again and the worms were wriggling in the box before them. Tomorrow morning.

**Author's Note:**

> u ever have a headcanon u feel so strongly about that u write a whole fic about it? yeah
> 
> this fic was brought to you by the following sponsors:
> 
> \- gyotaku is a very real art form which originated from fishermen wanting to record their catches—eventually it grew under patronage of the upper/ruling classes, who would commission prints of their own catches. 
> 
> \- [the hyukoh song of the same name](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmDD-QWlQpU)
> 
> \- [two best friends play yakuza 0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PT-Izrn3qKk&list=PL57hJfweW_2s8ztoONcYX--Vj796ZUa0i)


End file.
